“We know that the past cannot be changedIt cannot be erased either, as some might like, but you can learn from it”. Gabriel Boric was not born when the night of horror engulfed Chile. , start the commemorative activities of the 50 years of the military coup. The fall of Salvador Allende and the 17 years of dictatorship They will be a recurring theme throughout 2023, until reaching September. For now, an event from that past causes not only shudders these days: it also shows to what extent some wounds of the general’s regime Augusto Pinochet still claim to be thought and resolved. Since March 12, a good part of the eyes of Chileans have been attached to the screens of the TVN channel. On Sunday nights ‘Adopted, the story we are missing’, a six-episode documentary series, is broadcast.
Your manager, Christian Leightonhas returned about international adoptions promoted by the military government. Judge Mario Carroza has calculated that some 20,000 children passed through a similar path with a European destination and largely marked by opacity or the crime of appropriation. They were separated from their mothers after birth, through a recurring ruse: they almost always told the mother that she was child had died in childbirth. They made them sign documents they did not understand or declared them incompetent. They were handed over to foreign couples with the complicity of medical personnel, members of the Catholic Church and state agents. “They came looking for us. They put us on a plane. They didn’t tell us the truth: that we came from a far away place,” says one of those children in the documentary.
complaint documentaries
Leighton was 8 years old when Pinochet took power. He had previously gotten into the bowels of the regime when filming ‘Colonia Dignidad: a German sect in Chile‘. This new series was created together with Daniela Bunster. They filmed it in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany and in the southern Chilean region, where most of the babies came from. The director has not started from scratch. In 2014, the CIPER journalistic investigation center had revealed how a priest, Gerardo Joannon, gave up children who had been presumed dead for adoption. The university researcher Karen Alfaro, went further in shedding light on this sinister plot. The publication of ‘Chilean boys and girls adopted by Swedish families. Diplomatic proximity in times of the Cold War (1973-1990)’ caused a strong impact in 2021. According to the academic, the regime proposed to counteract the preaching of the Social Democratic government Olof Palme against Pinochet not only by relating to the Swedish extreme right. “The transnational adoption of poor Chilean boys and girls to Sweden was valued by the military dictatorship as a mechanism of diplomatic and political proximity.” Alejandro Vega’s documentaries had recently shed light on this same issue.
hatred of the poor
Leighton’s documentary returns to the drama of Alejandro Quezada, who was adopted by a Dutch family. Quezada has promoted the campaign ‘Chilean Adoptees Worldwide‘. His own biography has led him to a shocking conclusion: the dictatorship tried to keep the poorest families from raising their own children. It was very difficult for the mothers to face this logic, which especially punished the original Mapuche community. “These eugenic practices were not alien to the rest of the Latin American countries, as evidenced by the case of the massive forced sterilization of indigenous, rural and popular women in Peru, during the regime of Alberto Fujimoriin the 1990s,” says Martina Yopo, director of the Inequality Observatory at the Diego Portales University in a column published in the newspaper ‘La Tercera’.
The temporal coincidence of ‘Adopted, the story we are missing’ with half a century of the most dramatic moment in Chilean history gives this documentary another weight. Leighton believes that it helps to raise “an edge that perhaps is not so well known” about the gate of hell that opened in September 1973. “It is important to make visible and leave testimony of what happened.”
Tonight in @TVN , 4th Chapter of “Adopted, the story we are missing”. International adoption has diverse and complex consequences. The continuous elaboration of the past, individually and collectively, is a fundamental task to try to heal the wounds pic.twitter.com/iCZFtGB7Xe
— Cristián Leighton (@crisleighton) April 3, 2023
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In this regard, Yopo points out: “cases such as forced adoptions show us that as a society we still We are indebted to the victims of human rights violations”. In his opinion, it is essential “to advance in the judicial procedures that allow establishing criminal responsibilities and sanctions for those who participated in the forced adoptions, as well as in the recognition of the suffering of the victims and the implementation of effective reparation policies.”
Six years ago, the Supreme Court appointed Judge Carroza to lead the investigations. In 2021, Sweden promised to clarify more than 2,000 irregular adoptions of Chilean children. Boric’s government launched a pilot plan last year to expedite the search for hundreds of victims of illegal adoptions. The State has facilitated access to DNA sampling for those living abroad.